Grand Duke Herman Alexandrovich of Winia

Grand Duke Herman Alexandrovich of Winia (Russian: Герман Александр Александрович, tr. Hāman Aleksandr Aleksandrovich; 22 January 1915 – 22 January 2003) was the 'middle child' and only son of High Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna III of Winia and her consort, High Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Winia. He was a grandson of Kejsarinnan Frigga of Sweden.

He was raised in the Caucasus region, where he was first born in 22 January 1915 [one year after the reign of his parents began], and was educated by private tutors. As the second-in-line to the Winian throne, he was expected to follow both of his parents and his older sister [Yekaterina] in the military, but he vehemently refused incurring the wrath of Alix`s German godparents Kaiser Wilhelm II and his wife Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein. In response, his parents banned him from council meetings and practically [basically] ousted him from public decisions and rendered him absolutely useless as an heir; his parents appointed his far more emotionally-constrained younger sister [Anastasia] as the heir apparent to Yekaterina making her effectively second-in-line to the throne and demoting Herman to third-in-line to the throne. In 1946 he contracted a morganatic marriage with Countess Amalia Katharina of Fritz, a morganatic daughter of Prince Karl Nikolaus Wilhelm of Fritz and a granddaughter of Earl Maximilian II Emanuel of Fritz-Toby. For contracting this marriage without permission, he was stripped of his place in the line of the succession, lost his status as an Imperial Grand Duke and was forced into semi-permanent exile by his furious and extremely enraged parents.

For some years he lived in Wiesbaden, Nassau and in Cannes. He settled permanently in England in 1959, leasing Keele Hall in Staffordshire and later Kenwood House on the outskirts of London. He became a prominent member of British society, one of his daughters marrying into the British aristocracy and another marrying a great-grandson of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia, thus successfully restoring Herman and his family to dynastic status. After the death of his first [morganatic] wife, he remarried to Grand Duchess Nada Mikhailovna of Russia; the first-born child and only child born from the union of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia to his first wife [a German dynast of the House of Hohenzollern] Princess Wilhelmina Viktoria of Prussia. After marrying his second wife, he disowned his children from his first marriage, as he thought of them as possible problems to their dynastic siblings. In doing so, his parents reinstated him as the third-in-line-to the Winian Imperial Throne. His illegimente children were taken in by Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia [his father-in-law], who would forever hold a bad relationship with his eldest son-in-law over this issue. By his second marriage, he produced several children. He lost his fortune in Russia with the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1918. Three of his relatives in-laws were killed by the Bolsheviks, but he escaped the Russian Revolution because he was living abroad. He spent his last years teaching his great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren valuable life skills and appearing at events where a member of the House of Irene-Aquitania was required to attend.